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Nothing so extreme was required for “The Perplexed.” Still, over the course of three weeks and 23 previews, monologues were scrapped, blocking was restaged, 50-cent words were replaced with accessible synonyms and a final bow featuring the actors holding champagne glasses was tried once — then promptly trashed.
“For me, it’s all about figuring out what people are getting,” said Greenberg, whose Tony Award-winning play “Take Me Out” is being revived by Second Stage Theater in April.
“Until you get into rehearsal, you’re talking to yourself,” he explained. In the studio with a director and actors, a playwright has the benefit of clarifying his intentions, but all that changes in previews. “Then you get in front of a bunch of strangers, and you can hear when something is mystifying.”
Greenberg is as versed in the city’s educated, upper-middle class as a sommelier who knows his wine list, its undertones, its hints and everything else that gives nuance. His most recent works, “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” (2016) and the Tony-nominated “The Assembled Parties” (2013), were both directed by Meadow.
“The Perplexed” is a drawing-room play, literally — it is set in a lavish home library of an unseen, Jewish billionaire host, Berland Stahl — and figuratively. Like some characters from Greenberg’s previous works, the members of the wedding party here belong to a privileged, insular world, yet feel adrift amid changing cultural tides. While the countdown to a midnight ceremony ticks on, they hash out drama old and new.
We meet the bride (Tess Frazer) and her parents, City Councilwoman Evy Arlen-Stahl (Margaret Colin) and Joseph Stahl (Frank Wood), who is the billionaire’s disinherited son. Evy goes way back, both in business and pleasure, with the lawyer Ted Resnik (Gregg Edelman), the father of the groom (JD Taylor). Ted’s self-righteous, do-gooder wife is Natalie Hochberg-Resnik (Ilana Levine).
Also in the mix are Evy’s son, Micah (Zane Pais), a medical student who stars in gay adult films on the side; her writer brother (Patrick Breen); a former rabbi from South Carolina (Eric William Morris) dealing with some meshugas of his own; and one working-class character, Berland’s Guyanese aide Patricia Persaud (Anna Itty).
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